Not to weigh in on the “fan fiction” debate, in which I have no investment to be honest, but it seems to me that these little flare-ups and attempts to make a case for one form of art against another all miss a key point in the same way:

Art is, and should remain, a practice first and a product second.

The reason these hopeless and rather dispiriting disagreements keep happening is because we’ve fundamentally lost sight of art’s value as a practice over and above, and entirely outside of, its value as determined by what is produced.

So everyone gets stuck in a place where they’re trying to either defend or castigate work based on what results, which they think can be objectively measured as successful or not successful.

Once you accept art as practice, and make a defence for that practice as basically an inalienable right, a form of experimentation and expression that is fundamentally by and of the people, then all these stupid attempts at a taxonomy of value become empty.

It seems to me that there’s a lot of overlap between sneering at fan fiction and sneering at “arts and crafts”, folk art, amateur musicianship, outsider art, or basically anything that is non-professional and not sanctified by the marketplace.

Spaces where people can *do*, where they can engage in their chosen practice, where they can not only consume but also be part of the art they enjoy, and where it’s accepted that art is there to be *tried* rather than just passively purchased seem to me to be important.

And also: fun. I don’t know how we’ve got to this place where art must always be talked about as work and we legitimise its status as work by emphasising it’s difficulty but fun, play, experimentation, freedom etc are all important too.

To put this another way: I think whenever we get into a place where we’re lauding the professional over the amateur, or even protecting the professional from the amateur, at least in relation to art, we have to ask ourselves if we’ve erred.

And this is why I’m not especially convinced by the “but many published authors started off in fan fic” argument either. They did, but it doesn’t matter. Spaces shouldn’t be just hot-houses for professional development. A space doesn’t have to justify itself that way.